Murder in Brentwood

PUBLISHER’S PREFACE

THE O.J. SIMPSON CASE is a study in deceptions. Nobody involved-not Judge Ito, not the prosecutors, not the members of the jury, certainly not the defense counsel, and most definitely not O.J. Simpson-was much interested in the truth. Instead, they were all interested in their own well-being, their own cause, and how they looked to the millions who were watching.

In that process, it became apparent that somebody would have to be sacrificed, very publicly, so that the deceptions could continue. That person was, of course, Mark Fuhrman. And the way he would be sacrificed would be to exploit racial conflict.

Fuhrman played a pivotal role in this, the most noted murder case of the decade. Ironically, as the case unfolded, it was Detective Fuhrman who became the central focus rather than the defendant, who happened to be one of the most famous Americans ever tried for murder. And, therefore, Fuhrman has a riveting story to tell.

As a publisher concerned about justice, about the state of American culture and values, and in a world fascinated by the Simpson case, we thought that a book by Mark Fuhrman was obviously a good idea. We started discussing the possibility with Fuhrman even before he testified in the Simpson trial, and were close to concluding a deal. As controversy surrounding the case, and Fuhrman, intensified, Darryl Mounger, Fuhrman’s lawyer, advised him to wait. Finally, we did sign a contract.

But within days after signing that contract, the now-infamous Fuhrman tapes were released.

We knew Mark well enough to believe his account that the tapes were made exclusively to provide material for a screenplay, and that he was “in character” when he used offensive expressions and racial epithets. The sworn testimony of Laura Hart McKinny, his co-writer, confirmed his story.

In the face of a media and propaganda firestorm against Fuhrman, we decided that we could do him little good and perhaps even more harm, and suggested he take his book to one of the major
New York
publishers better able to weather such a storm. But with his lawyer’s advice, Mark again put off the idea of a book until things calmed down. We were certain that another publisher would sign him up with a huge advance.

But we were wrong. Several publishers, including virtually all of the major
New York
houses, turned Fuhrman down. We don’t know, of course, what the reasoning behind any of those decisions was. But we do know that Fuhrman is controversial and very politically incorrect, and that authors such as Fuhrman are not what most
New York
editors are looking for. As anybody who reads his book will quickly discover, however, Fuhrman can shed more light on this famous murder case than just about anybody else.

And so for us it became a matter of principle, as books for us so often are, and we decided to proceed. As we have worked with Fuhrman, and as we have edited his manuscript, we are convinced that we are publishing a very good and honest book.

Fuhrman’s role in the Simpson case is laden with ironies. The murder case had nothing to do with race until Simpson’s lawyers injected it, with all of the intensity they could muster, into the trial. Yet Detective Fuhrman, as his book makes very clear, may be the only one who can bring a degree of candor to the issue as it involves the Simpson case.

The case was also full of deliberate deceptions and untruths, but it was Detective Fuhrman who was labeled the perjurer. How ironic that he is now the one person directly involved in the case who has no reason to deceive! His book is what the trial should have been-the facts, as they happened, and the evidence, as it was found.

And finally, it was a murder case involving only one suspect who was on trial for killing two people. Yet the only person convicted of anything was Detective Fuhrman-the detective who did everything he was supposed to do at the crime scene, and whose conviction involved a circumstance that had nothing to do with the murders.

The Simpson case has come to symbolize much more than the brutal murder of two innocent people. Instead, it symbolizes how racial prejudice can be exploited for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many. And it symbolizes how our system of justice, the very backbone of our democracy, is easily exploited and damaged, again for the benefit of the few and at the expense of the many.

If Mark Fuhrman can play even a small role in correcting these wrongs, he will have succeeded as an author, and we will have succeeded as his publisher.

Alfred S. Regnery Publisher

FOREWORD

THERE ARE MANY VICTIMS in the Simpson murder case other than Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. But once we get past their surviving loved ones, no one has been unjustifiably victimized by these murders more than Mark Fuhrman. Awakened from his sleep at
1:05
in the early morning hours of
June 13, 1994
, he went to the Bundy crime scene and for several hours thereafter participated in the investigation of the murders. Among his observations, he found a bloody right-hand glove on the grounds of O.J. Simpson’s estate which was the mate of a left-hand glove found at the Bundy murder scene.

Though he did nothing wrong at all (and no one has been able to produce a speck of evidence to the contrary), his involvement in the investigation has almost destroyed his life. Even before his unfortunate error or lie on the witness stand (I speak in the disjunctive because it is not clear, at least to me, which it was) that he had not used the “N” word in the previous ten years, he was publicly accused by Simpson s defense team of being a virulent racist who had done one of the most despicable deeds that one human can do to another-frame O.J. Simpson for the murders.

After his error or lie on the witness stand, he was maligned and vilified perhaps more than any other person within recent memory, not even excluding O.J. Simpson. At least Simpson has a significant percentage of the population who still believe in his innocence and sing his praises. Not so with Fuhrman by the end of the trial. It seemed he had no friends. In Johnnie Cochran’s final summation to the jury, he referred to Fuhrman as a “genocidal racist, a perjurer, America’s worst nightmare, the personification of evil,” and even compared him to Adolf Hitler. Unbelievably, even the prosecutors joined in the vilification of Fuhrman, Marcia Clark actually telling the jury in her summation: “Do we wish that there were no such person on this planet? Yes.” In fact, even his superiors at the LAPD denounced him severely. And not one of the “Talking Heads” on television, who have made a cottage industry out of commentating on the Simpson case had one good word to say about Fuhrman.

In a telephone conversation with Mark Fuhrman on the morning of
October 14, 1996
, he told me, “Vince, I just returned from my first meeting with my P.O. (Probation Officer).” Can you imagine that? Mark Fuhrman, who devoted years of his life, as all police officers do, so that the rest of us can live in a safer and more civilized America, and at the very worst had committed the most insignificant kind of perjury, was now a felon. But O.J. Simpson, who murdered two human beings, brutally cutting them down in the springtime of their lives, was acquitted of the murder charges and out playing golf with a smile on his face.

When my book Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O.J. Simpson Got Away With Murder was first published in June of 1996, and I pointed out the terrible injustice of what had happened to Mark Fuhrman, his mother, Bithe, called me crying and said, “You’re the only one who stuck up for my son.” It wasn’t difficult for me to do. After all, as I’ve said, Fuhrman had done absolutely nothing wrong at all during his investigation of these murders, and even if we assumed he lied on the witness stand, it probably wasn’t even perjury. Lay people are under the erroneous impression that lying under oath is automatically perjury. But it’s not. Granted, it’s the most important element of the corpus delicti of perjury. But there is a second element to perjury under Section 118 of the California Penal Code. The lie has to concern some “material matter,” i.e., it must be relevant to an issue in the case. For instance, unless a witness’s age or weight is somehow relevant to an issue in the case, their lying under oath about their age or weight is not perjury. Fuhrman s alleged lie about not using a racial slur within the previous ten years was not, in my judgment, perjury, since it had nothing to do with whether Simpson was guilty or not guilty of these murders.

A great many people have asserted that the sentence imposed upon Fuhrman by the judge on the perjury charge (three years’ probation and a $200 fine) was far too lenient. I don’t agree at all. There is nothing sacrosanct about a person receiving punishment for a crime exclusively by way of a sentence handed out by a court. It’s just that a court sentence is the typical and usually best way of bringing about justice. Many times, however, the punishment has already been imposed upon the defendant by extra-legal means. Nowhere is that reality exemplified more clearly than with respect to Mark Fuhrman. In addition to his name being defamed and besmirched throughout the nation and his becoming an object of ridicule and even satire on comedy shows, Fuhrman was forced into an early retirement, and after his no contest plea to the perjury charge on October 22, 1996, he is now a convicted felon, no longer having, among other things, the right to vote or even own a firearm of any kind.

And like all things in life, there are degrees of perjury. For those purists who maintain that perjury is perjury, and it is all equally bad, I would assume that to be consistent, they would believe that all conspiracy is the same, be it a conspiracy to commit murder, or conspiracy to commit petty theft, disturb the peace, or maybe bird-watch.

perhaps the most serious perjury would be a witness knowingly and falsely accusing an innocent person of a crime. Though not condoning it in any way, on a scale of one to ten, Fuhrman’s perjury, if we assume it was perjury, was a one. He simply didn’t want to
 
admit-he was
 
too
 
embarrassed to admit-in front of a predominantly black jury that he had used the racial slur “nigger” within the past ten years. But since his use of the epithet had no relevance to any issue in the case, Judge Lance Ito should have never allowed the defense to even ask Fuhrman whether he had used it. It was an egregiously erroneous ruling by Ito that was in contravention of Section 352 of the California Evidence Code. Section 352 provides that if the relevance of offered evidence (in this case, Fuhrman’s use of the “N” word) is “substantially outweighed” by the probability of prejudice to the opposing side, the evidence should be excluded. Here, the relevance of Fuhrman using the “N” word was extremely remote at best. I mean, it is a non sequitur and broad jump of Olympian proportions to conclude that just because someone used the “N” word, or is even a racist, that they’re going to go around framing black people for murder. But the probability of prejudice to the opposing side (the prosecution) was more than the requisite substantial; it was monumental, and hence, should have been excluded.

Even if Ito did not want to follow the law in this case, common sense, which Ito exhibited precious little of during the trial, should have told him that it was improper to allow the defense to ask Fuhrman the subject question. Every day throughout the land, thousands of white police officers arrest or investigate black suspects. Does anyone really believe that when these thousands upon thousands of cases come to court it is perfectly proper to ask every one of these officers whether he has ever used the “N” word within the previous ten years, and if he denies it, and you can prove that he did, have a separate, satellite trial on that issue, which is precisely what essentially happened during the Simpson murder trial?

In my opinion, the entire Fuhrman matter was blown completely out of proportion. The Fuhrman affair reminds me of the theoretical situation of a traffic ticket being contested and ending up in the United States Supreme Court. Much ado about nothing. Can you imagine that the Simpson defense was so preposterously weak that the cornerstone for their defense was that Mark Fuhrman had used the “N” word at some time during the previous ten years? That says it all, doesn’t it? They built their whole case around the theory that because Fuhrman had used the epithet, he was a racist, and therefore framed Simpson by, among other things, planting the killers bloody glove at Simpson’s Rockingham estate. But it should be noted that Mark Fuhrman could not have planted the glove at Simpson’s estate in the early morning hours of June 13, 1994, even if he had wanted to. Fourteen LAPD officers had arrived at the Bundy murder scene before Mark Fuhrman arrived at 2:10 A.M., and all fourteen saw only one glove at the murder scene. Therefore, there was no second glove at Bundy/or Mark Fuhrman to pick up and deposit at Simpson’s Rockingham estate.

The entire thrust of the defense position in the criminal trial vis-a-vis Mark Fuhrman is that he had framed Simpson because Fuhrman is a racist. But if Fuhrman was such a racist that he was willing to frame black people, how come out of the hundreds upon hundreds of black people he arrested throughout the years, how come there wasn’t a parade of black people taking the witness stand at the criminal trial to testify that Mark Fuhrman had framed them? If, hypothetically, you’re a black man who has been framed by Mark Fuhrman for a burglary, and you spend five years at San Quentin, and when you get out you see that Mark Fuhrman is in the news, don’t you automatically call Johnnie Cochran or another member of the defense team and say to them: “Hey, this guy framed me”? You would do this not just to get even with Fuhrman, which would be your primary motivation, but in doing so you would also be a hero to many in the black community, and could even sell your story. Yet not one single black person took the witness stand at the criminal trial to testify that Mark Fuhrman, at any time during his twenty years with the Los Angeles Police Department, had framed him or her. And the reason no such black person so testified is no such black person exists. It’s blather, tommyrot, moonshine! But remarkably, the prosecutors in the Simpson case, among a great number of other powerful arguments that had to be made by them but weren’t, never made this obvious argument.

If one is interested in ironies, what could be more ironic than this? To most blacks, Mark Fuhrman is the very embodiment of the virulently racist white cop whom they fear and detest with a passion. O.J. Simpson, on the other hand, has been and unfortunately still is a hero to millions of blacks, someone they supported during his trial with an unqualified fervor, celebrating his acquittal with almost rhapsodic joy. That’s one reality. But here’s the other. For several long and gritty years, Mark Fuhrman worked South Central, a heavily black area of Los Angeles with the highest violent crime rate in the city; an urban jungle whose mean, squalid, and untamable streets the average white person would not dare walk through at night...
 
and many wouldn’t even in daylight. What was Fuhrman’s job? For a barely livable wage, going down there every day to protect law-abiding blacks from the black criminal element. In other words, on a day-to-day basis, Fuhrman, the racist black-hater, was risking his life to protect black people, not white folks, since the latter don’t live in South Central. What was Simpson doing during the same period? Living and moving exclusively in the white social and corporate world. If any reader believes that Simpson, who would need a road map to get back to the hood, would daily (or at any time) risk his life to save any of the black people of South Central, I can only say that your naiveté is staggering. Simpson, in fact, couldn’t even find time to do infinitely less than that for fellow blacks. As reported in the
 
August
 
29,
  
1994,
 
edition
 
of Newsweek, “[Simpson] would promise to appear at community centers or youth programs in South Central, Los Angeles, then bow out at the last moment.” Football legend Jim Brown, who for years has devoted his life to helping rehabilitate the black criminal element, told me that throughout the years, “there was no evidence of O.J. in the black community.”

For those people who think that the reason I have come to Fuhrman’s defense is that I am an apologist for racist cops and the criminal behavior some engage in against minorities because of it, they simply don’t know me. In fact, show me another white public personality who within the past five years has spoken out publicly, and in depth, about how to substantially reduce the police brutality problem against blacks in America. In a long article in the February 1993 edition of Playboy magazine prompted by the Rodney King case and subsequent riot titled “NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE,” I pointed out, with irrefutable statistics, that district attorneys around the country rarely ever prosecute the police for engaging in brutality and excessive force against members of minority communities, primarily blacks. I denounced this practice and strongly urged district attorneys to commence criminal prosecutions against the very small percentage of offending officers who, by their conduct, stain the blue uniform of the rest of the force. I reasoned that these prosecutions would be the most efficacious way, by far, to substantially reduce this type of police misconduct. So my sympathies do not lie with racist police who brutalize black people.

Since I have come to know Mark Fuhrman only relatively recently, I can’t speak with any assurance whether or not he ever entertained strongly racist feelings toward blacks. Certainly, the so-called Fuhrman tapes suggest he did. However, there is no evidence that his feelings toward blacks ever manifested themselves in any criminal behavior against them. Moreover, the Fuhrman tapes go all the way up to 1994, and the last time Fuhrman uses the “N” word on the tapes is 1988, six years earlier. Also, in 1994, when the Simpson murders occurred, Mark Fuhrman had black friends, he was getting up two to three mornings a week at five to play basketball with fellow black officers, and in a 1994 case I verified before the publication of my book Outrage, worked very hard to free a Mack man charged with the murder of a white man when he came upon evidence of the black man’s innocence. (And it’s the view of virtually everyone that Fuhrman, who finished number two in his class at the Police Academy, was a thoroughly professional officer throughout his career whose daily work was a model of efficiency.)

But none of this, really, is relevant. The only thing that is relevant is whether Mark Fuhrman framed O.J. Simpson. And the evidence is conclusive that he did not. Therefore, even if he were the biggest racist ever to come down the plank, the vilification, calumny, and unremitting revilement and ridicule of Mark Fuhrman that has befallen him is very wrong.